Sustainable Digitalization - An introduction

DSI PhD Excellence Program 2024 - Professor Postdoc Pitch

Mario Angst

Hello

Resources

Online booklet with minimal content summaries/ further reading and complete sources:

https://marioangst.github.io/susdigi_course/

Me

Mario Angst

Lead sustainability.discourses project @ DSI, Co-Lead DSI Community Sustainability

Past: 🌊,🌲,🌾,⚡,(🛢) governance

Now: 🏙️ and 🖥️+🍀

polsci, susci, comp socsci methods (mostly network analysis, NLP, Bayesian modeling)

Biased toward strong sustainability, bikes and local solutions.

Goals

  • You are exposed to the core components of sustainability as a normative concept
  • You are aware of some existing frameworks to think in a structured way about relating digitalization and sustainability transformations
  • I get to talk a little bit about sustainability imaginaries and where to find them

Sustainability as a normative concept

A key differentiation

  • Sustainability as a normative concept, including its discoursive contestation and imaginaries
  • Sustainability transformations as socio-technical change processes oriented toward sustainability

The Brundtland definition

This is the text ©️

Take 2 minutes to read the text from “Our common future” (1989) in front of you

Take care, this is quite radical stuff

The Brundtland definition

intra- and intergenerational justice is front and center

Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.

but there were/ are many other sustainability definitions

Making sense of sustainability definitions

It all comes down to substitution of natural capital for future generations

  • weak sustainability: substitution is ok given function is retained and utility non-declining

  • strong sustainability: natural capital needs to be at least maintained

    • multi-functionality of biosphere
    • option space of future generations
    • precautionary principle

🤯 Beware of “nature” 🍃

What about the three pillars?

We don’t talk about the three pillars

What about the UN 2030 Agenda?

  • Outcome of a political process
  • Anyone remember the Millenium Development Goals? The Agenda 21?
  • Conceptually weak, normatively… powerful? Evidence is mixed.

Three core strategies

So sustainability is an interconnected problem of distributive justice and resource use. Three strategies everyone should be aware of in order to reduce resource use:

  • efficiency
  • sufficiency
  • consistency

Decoupling

… (economic) activity from resource use

  • single decoupling: green growth narrative, often efficiency only
  • double decoupling: efficiency + sufficiency

Sustainability imaginaries

“In a certain sense, a sustainable world is a fiction” (Martens 2006, 40):

  • Modernization
  • Transformation
  • Control

Modernization

weak sustainability, “green growth”

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Transformation

strong sustainability, post-growth, solidarity economy

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Control

resilience, inevitability and emergency

powerful entities solve crises with emergency powers

https://radicaloceanfutures.earth/

Sustainable digitalization

Starting point: The LES framework

  • Life cycle impacts
  • Enabling impacts
  • Structural impacts

Life cycle impacts

Actual material impacts

  • Production and disposal
  • Operating the infrastructure

Data center example: Energy, land…

Enabling impact

  • New actions that are enabled by digitalization (or prevented)

Three types of enabling impacts regarding resources:

  • Process optimization: Immaterial replaces material resource (information reducing travel impacts)
  • Media substitution: material replaces material resource (e-book, physical books)
  • Externalization of control: immaterial replaces immaterial (eg. centralizing a previous process optimization step)

Structural impact

Persistent macro-level changes in:

  • economic structure
  • societal institutions

LES x core strategies bingo

Life-cycle Enabling Structural
Sufficiency
Efficiency
Consistency

Sustainable digitalization imaginaries

  • Remember?
    • Modernization: weak sustainability, green growth
    • Transformation: strong sustainability, solidarity economy, post-growth
    • Control: emergency, inevitability, powerful entities “solve”

Where I get to talk about finding narratives

sustainability.discourses

sustainability.discourses project

  • Automated methods for mapping sustainability discourse
  • Application to urban sustainability discourses, specifically sustainable transport
  • Discourse networks
  • Public-facing tools such as zuerich.sustainability.discourses.ch

Weaving Sustainable Digital Future Stories

Course HS 2024

[DSI PhD Excellence Program] X sustainability.discourses X [ZHdK Master Minor Kunst, Wissenschaft, Transformationen]

Let’s talk

  • What is your imaginary?
  • Where does your research fit in?
  • Sustainable practices in your life as a researcher (I have some thoughts opinions)
  • (…)

Sustainable Digitalization - An introduction